Welcome to the new Becker-Posner Blog, maintained by the University of Chicago Law School.

08/12/2007

Response to Comments on Social Obesity--Posner

An excellent comment points out that obesity increases with urbanization and female employment outside the home, and therefore is global. It increases with urbanization because urban work tends to be less physically strenuous than rural, and with female employment because work outside the home increases the time cost of home-cooked meals and thus the demand for restaurant, fast food, and junk food fare, all of which tend to be fattening because the purveyors compete to provide food that is at once cheap, tasty, and filling. In these respects, professional food preparers probably outcompete home cooking on average.
Several of the comments criticize my introductory remarks about homosexuality. I said that "in a heterogeneous society, practice tends to be normative. That is why homosexual activists greatly exaggerate the prevalence of homosexuality--asserting, on the basis of a misreading of Kinsey's famous studies, that 10 percent of the population is homosexual, whereas the true figure is probably at most 2 percent. The more homosexuals there are, the stronger their claim to be normal, a claim that would fail in a society that had a strict moral code condemning homosexuality. Similarly, the more fat people there are, the more being fat is seen as normal." One comment predicts that I will offer "profuse apologies" for these remarks and particularly for having used the term "homosexual" rather than the politically correct "gay," and another ascribes my political incorrectness to my age. The word "homosexual" is not pejorative; nor has it yet been displaced by "gay"; until it is, I have no inclination to switch merely in order to make a political statement. I should however have made clear that (as one of the comments notes) in saying that only 2 percent of the population is homosexual, I did not mean to suggest that only 2 percent have had a homosexual experience. In my book Sex and Reason I point out that "opportunistic" homosexuality (homosexual acts by persons whose orientation is heterosexual) is common in situations in which persons of the other sex are not available as sexual partners, as in prisons and (traditionally) on naval vessels. Ancient Greek homosexuality was primarily opportunistic, and today we have the curious phenomenon of "LUGS"--lesbians until graduation.